


Addendum

by periferal



Category: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Angst, Attempted Blackmail, Blackmail, Epistolary, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Prompt Fill, Rare Pairings, Story: The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-08
Updated: 2017-08-08
Packaged: 2018-12-12 15:17:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11739723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/periferal/pseuds/periferal
Summary: Why was Lestrade unable to stop Milverton on his own? What did the man have on him?Written for rarepairfest 2017





	Addendum

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pocketbookangel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pocketbookangel/gifts).



_Editor’s note: Obviously, Watson never did follow through on Inspector Lestrade’s request to burn this letter. Instead, he kept it, to be found in a strong box in the old cottage by the daughter of a friend, some decades later._

_It appears to be genuine, for it was found with some early drafts of such later stories as_ His Last Bow _and various shorts from_ The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes _._

 

[From the papers of the late Dr. John H. Watson]

November 5th, 1903

Watson,

Having recently read your story _The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton_ in the Strand, I find myself compelled to explain my final remarks, which you recorded with remarkable accuracy for something that happened so long ago. I know that your reading public does not always consider me an intelligent man, and that this was an impression you shared for a long time. We have since become friends, you and I, and I hope that I have gained even Holmes’s respect, but reading through this most recent tale, I realize that for once, there is information I have that neither of you have.

            It is good to know that it was not the two of you who killed that horrible man. Holmes’s attempt at a humorous deflection only served to grow my concern, but I did not have the heart to truly investigate Milverton’s death. It was generally considered by the Yard that a violent end was a long time coming for such a man. Within the privacy of this letter, which I hope you will have the presence of mind to burn, I will confess to you that the knowledge that it was one of that man’s female victims who killed him brings me deep satisfaction.

            I find myself delaying what I meant to say without hesitation. I have kept this secret in my breast for so long that despite the permission of the other involved party, my pen hesitates and I wonder if I am making a grave mistake. I fear putting myself and this other party through what has so recently befallen Oscar Wilde, and I do not have his fame or his money or anything else which has protected him from violent reprisal on top of the grave legal consequences. It is only the knowledge that you are my friend, and that you would be nothing if hypocritical to find anything repulsive in what I am about to confess, which allows me to continue.

            We, meaning myself and another Inspector at the Yard, were not as without proof of villainy against Milverton as a reader of your story might suspect. There was some amount of documentary evidence that he had, in his early years, stolen incriminating papers himself, instead of purchasing them from a maid or some other person of that type. We would have attempted to bring an actual case against him, perhaps even come up with a reason to search his home and find the safe holding the papers we knew were there, if not for one small detail.

            There was a letter, which Milverton acquired some years ago, though by what means I have never been able to discern, that I had written and was of a rather indelicate nature. As if this were not bad enough, and this is the confession which has given me such cause to fear what I am doing in this letter, this letter was addressed to a man.

            Ah, I will out with it! The letter was addressed to Tobias Gregson, whom you of course know. We would both surely be ruined if it was released to say, the press, or the Yard, and Milverton made it quite clear that this was what would happen if we tried to move against him.

            I was young when I wrote that letter, and had only recently joined the force. I had a vague awareness of the nature of my particular inversions and a much stronger desire to suppress it, if only to avoid bringing shame to my poor, dear mother. I also had some vague notion of some sort of eventual marriage, and perhaps children, because this seemed the proper thing to do as a man.

            He was another copper, equally young and with an intelligence and an energy that I found intriguing. We are both dullards compared to Holmes, but I am far more a dullard than he is. It began, as many such trysts do, without devious intent. I knew that I felt myself drawn to him, of course, but this did not vex me terribly. I was confident in my own self-control.

            I remember we had beats in the same district. Not Whitechapel, thank the Lord, or we would have both been dead or badly maimed, what with how the place was back then, but some place almost as unpleasant to be. We would encounter each other on occasion, mostly at night. Nothing came of it then.

            One moment that stays in my memory, which perhaps marks the beginning of what I could say was our attraction to each other, was one particular Sunday night where the quarter moon was visible despite the atmosphere. It was raining, the sort of miserable rain that soaks through clothing into the skin, and I saw him in an alley way where our rounds crossed.

            His hair was plastered to his forehead under his helmet. I am too embarrassed to go into more detail, but suffice to say that I noticed a good deal more about him than I had allowed myself to before that moment. Even now, I can say with confidence that I had never seen someone so handsome.

            Mortified at myself, and fearing that he would somehow know my thoughts, I attempted to hurry past him and continue with my route. I did not want to lose the small friendship I had found with him, and I was certain that he was a normal sort of man, totally unlike myself.

            I asked him years later why he did what he did next. He has told me that he does not know. He grabbed my wrist—I remember the feeling of his glove on my hand—and turned me around. “Lestrade,” he said. I felt something twist inside me, a sense that my life had changed. I also felt dread, realizing that I would never be happy as nothing more than Tobias’s friend.

            “Yes?” I asked, fearing I sounded like the heroine of a penny dreadful.

            “Nothing,” he said, and dropped my wrist.

            “Oh,” I said, too confused to say anything else.

            The next morning my landlady at the boarding house where I was living on my policeman’s salary reported that a green carnation had been left for me. She was a kind older woman, with a penchant for snooping that I confess I share—unsurprising, considering my profession—and utterly ignorant of the significance of the flower. She assumed a young woman had left it. I took it, suspicious of its source and uncertain why he would use such an upper-class symbol for deviance.

            I realize now, in retrospect, that perhaps she had some inkling and that I was merely incredibly lucky. We were both incredibly lucky, in those early days.

            I could not be certain that it was Tobias who had sent me the flower, or that it was not some ploy for my arrest. To confirm my suspicion, feeling a more than a little like I was putting on airs, I returned the flower to him the next time our paths crossed, giving some story about how I had been asked to give it to him by a young lady. A transparent ploy, I know, but I had to give myself something resembling an excuse.

            To my great relief, he took the flower and said, “The young lady looks rather fetching this evening. I am relieved she understood my message—I was afraid stealing symbols from the gentry would mean she would misunderstand.”

            “The young lady was wondering if you had considered giving her your address?” I felt silly using the game he had started, but I did wish to know. It would raise suspicion to come and go together from either where he was living or were I was living, and I had a notion of writing him a letter.

            “She should expect a note,” he said. The mirth left his face for a moment. “You understand that we must be careful?”

            The shadow of Wilde’s disgrace hung over us, as it still hangs over so many. “Yes,” I said. “I understand.”

            The letter which found itself in the hands of Magnussen was one of my first, and also one of my worst. I am no poet, but I dare say I thought myself close to one, for a brief time, and I wrote the most horrid prose. I do not understand why Tobias still finds me desirable, after that letter—poetry has no place in the pen of an inspector.

            To my knowledge, you unintentionally burned it along with the rest of Milverton’s collection. Thank you, and my apologies for not acknowledging what you have done for us until this moment. It was not safe for me to do so. It is still not safe, but I hope delivering this message to you myself will prevent what happened once before.

            Our affair began almost too intensely, the sort of hidden tryst that sounds rather romantic from the outside but ends with muddy knees and wet hair. We were very lucky that no one worth mentioning ever discovered us. I suppose it is a natural result of where we were that two men doing unnatural thing to each other in the dark was not something to bother reporting.

            “My dear,” I remember he said one evening, as we rested in one of those discrete hotels where the owners ask no questions for a small fee, “one of your letters has gone missing. I must have burned it with the papers by accident.”

            I sat bolt upright, a tenseness I could not fully put in to words seizing my chest. “If someone has found it…” I began, my mind already spinning through possible horrors. We both wished to rise within the force, and something like our relations would destroy any hopes of that.

            “I know,” he said, clasping my hands in his. “It would break my heart for my stupidity to be the cause of your pain.” I saw his lips pinch in the darkness. “We must be even more discrete, until we know what has become of the letter.”

            I kissed him. He smelled like the streets we both patrolled, that we both hoped to at least partly escape. “Of course,” I said. “I am not the one who loses letters.”

            “No more writing,” he said.

            “That is probably for the best,” I said.

            A reader of your stories will know Tobias and myself as the bitterest of rivals, vying for the position of most intelligent, or most respected, or the first to discover whatever clue will lead to the murderer. You, Watson, might even have assumed that we were vying for the attention or approval of your friend. And there is some truth in all of that. We are, to some extent, rivals in our work. I have always been of a competitive nature, and truth be told he is in many ways a better detective than I am. Not that I will ever admit it to him.

            But there is an element of deliberateness to degree we take that rivalry, at least in public. It at least began as an attempt to prevent what eventually happened to us. Perhaps we did not keep up the act as best we should have, because Milverton seemed confident that there were others who at least had suspicions of what he knew. If nothing else, it made us both better officers, and aided in our mutual rising to the rank of Inspector.

            If it turns out that you, or Holmes, knew, and never said anything, I would not be surprised. We were as discrete as any two men could be, but proximity is its own temptation.

            My first encounter with Milverton, which rapidly became Tobias’s first encounter with Milverton as well, happened after the son of a famously moralistic Marquees killed himself upon the publication of a series of letters which were in many ways like the one I had lost. I discovered, by what means I cannot quite recall, that a girl who had been a maid at the Marquess’s house had found work as a servant at his house mere months before the publication of the letter.

            I had heard rumors of his blackmailing tendencies for months previously, but had not witnessed anything resembling proof myself. This evidence was, of course, rather circumstantial, but it was enough to confirm in my mind that Milverton was somehow behind that man’s death. I did not know why exactly he had orchestrated the publishing of those papers until later (the answer was, of course, money and influence, as it always was), but no one else would have done it.

            Tobias, on my request, asked someone he knew who was slightly more connected in the Government than we were to ask around a little, and as he told it the friend refused absolutely. Supposedly he very nearly pushed him out the door in his haste, unwilling to even entertain the idea of entertaining the topic.

            “It’s not worth pursuing,” I told him when he returned. We were at my lodgings, in my room. My landlady was more discrete, or possibly just a little more deaf, than Tobias’s. “He will bring himself down, some day, I am certain of that. Until then, it’s not worth—it’s not worth your career.” Or his life, I thought. We were both hardier than the aristocratic Wilde, but two years hard labor and a lifetime of humiliation was not something either of us were interested in. Unlike Wilde, we do not exactly have the means to flee to Paris, or live there comfortably.

            He shook his head. “It’s not worth your career either.” He put his hand on my cheek, stroking my jaw with his thumb. He kissed me with his mouth closed, a quick affirmation. “I am more protected than you are, and I have less to lose. Do not worry about me.”

            The second friend turned out to be even more frightened of Milverton than the first. And I can only imagine that it was he who told the man of our attempts to gather information on him, because the second day after Tobias’s disastrous meeting with him, a well-dressed man came up to me at the Yard and gave me a card.

            “From Charles Augustus Milverton,” he said, before scurrying off. I still do not know if he was a lackey or just yet another victim.

            _6pm, at the lodgings of Tobias Gregson_ it read.

            My heard leapt to my throat. My first instinct was to rush to Tobias’s side and attempt to formulate some way of thwarting what I knew to be upon us, but even that might look suspicious.

            He was very polite. Even as I sat there, watching him fiddle with a small envelope, wishing I could unload my revolver in his stomach and feeling acid in my throat, he was polite. I believe this is why I hate him. A villain whose behaviors match his morals cannot pretend to be a victim. Milverton did not look the part of a monster.

            We knew this as well as he did.

            “Gentlemen,” he said, his voice full of false kindness, “I have heard from some good friends of mine that you are quite unlawfully looking in my private affairs.” He smiled, spreading his hands in false benevolence. “I fear that I have come upon some compromising letters, which if published and taken out of context could very well upset you both greatly. Now, normally I would ask for a fee in exchange for benevolence, but in this instance, all I ask of you both is to drop the matter entirely. Is that understood?”

            I watched Tobias swallow as I attempted to find words. “I assume you will not return the letter?”

            Milverton laughed. “Oh, my dear sir, that would be rather unwise of me, would it not?”

            On that note, he left the room.

            “You should leave me,” I said. “It’s not safe for you, you’ve already risked too much.” I stood, as though to leave.

Much as he had that fateful night, Tobias grabbed my wrist. “I am never leaving you,” he said. “Not for that man’s sake.” He sighed, moving his hand so that our fingers tangled together.

            We walked over to the settee and sat there, unspeaking.

            He leaned into my chest, and I put my arms around him. “What are we supposed to do?” I asked.

            “Pray, I suppose,” he said, and not without irony.

            I know there are those like me who keep their faith, and I wonder at them and envy them but cannot imitate them. They say Oscar Wilde was Catholic when he died—I suppose, of all the Christian sorts, that one fits the most.

            “I am sure he will die, some day,” I said. I was unaware of how prophetic my words were.

            It was a few years later when it came to my attention that Holmes was doing his best to bring down Milverton himself. This was through the first friend who had thrown Tobias out in his terror.

            “If anyone can bring him down, it is Holmes,” I said. We were in my rooms, this time. We no longer corresponded, had not corresponded in years but our rivalry had become so well-known through yours stories, Watson, that even our colleagues would not have imagined we were as good as living together.

            “Yes,” Tobias said, but his face was lined with concern. “Should we tell him what we can?”

            I shook my head. “We don’t know if we can trust him,” I said. “Not with this, in any case.”

            He sighed. “If there is a heaven,” he said, “I hope it is a place where we do not have to hide.”

            Do you understand that? You hide yourself in plain sight, with a wife whom I know works as a governess somewhere far out in the country as your shield from criticism.

            Tobias and I have taken to wearing wedding rings. They match, but so do many men’s rings. People assume we are married, to women.

            You, I suppose, have never been at risk of exposure.

            The news of Milverton’s death came to the yard and we nearly celebrated. I would have drunk a toast to damn the man’s soul, to the man’s killer, if it wouldn’t have drawn attention to myself.

            I said at the beginning of this letter that I had my suspicions. Tobias was certain that it had been the two of you, and it only confirmed in his mind that you and Holmes were much like the two of us. And I had to ask Holmes if he would help me investigate. It was such a bizarre murder, in the home of a man who was notorious for his obsession for security, that it was expected I seek you out.

            “I wish I could have killed him,” I said upon my return home. “I wish I could have been the one to kill him, the one to tear him slowly apart with my hands. It was my fault. I should have fixed it.”

            I should have thanked you that night. Instead, I thank you now, spurred by the publication of your story to put myself into your hands, as it were.

            Milverton’s death was right. I am a man of the law, and I am not supposed to condone illegal acts of violence, but that man was a black mark on the face of humanity and that woman, whose name I do not know, wiped it clean forever.

            Please, I beg you, burn this letter upon reading it. I have spent enough time on it already. It is late, and Tobias is asking me if I shall ever join him.

            I wish both you and Holmes the best of luck—I hear that you are to retire soon to Sussex? If this is so, I would like to hear it.

            My sincerest thanks,

Lestrade


End file.
